[TR] Gear Reduction Starter

[Andrew Uprichard]

Randall:  I seem to remember your last TR3 invited an idiot to make love to
it.  Do you have a sign on your cars "I'm a rare Triumph TR3 - come hit me"
???

Andrew Uprichard

-----Original Message-----
From: triumphs-bounces at autox.team.net
[mailto:triumphs-bounces at autox.team.net] On Behalf Of Randall
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 5:09 PM
To: terryrs at comcast.net; triumphs at autox.team.net
Subject: Re: [TR] Gear Reduction Starter

> When I
> turn the key and push the button, power complete drains the system and 
> even the electric fuel pump stops running.

I'd consider that good evidence that the problem is outside of the starter.
A healthy battery should be able to deliver several volts even into a dead
short at the starter.  Bad ground strap or (most common in my experience) a
poor connection between clamp and battery post.  With the starter trying to
draw literally hundreds of amps, it doesn't take much at all for that joint
to get hot and refuse to connect.

> 
> Question.  I had sort of thought that these new gear reduction 
> starters would be more reliable than the old stock starters.  Has 
> there been any experience out there otherwise?

Yup.  The gear reduction starter that I installed in 2001 has been fairly
troublesome for the past couple of years now.  It started cranking slower
and slower; then intermittently refusing to crank at all.  When I pulled it
off and apart, I found that the ball bearings carrying the armature were
ruined (as in the round balls were now cubes).  Kind of looks like the heat
from the exhaust cooked all the grease out of them, and allowed rust to
form.  The slow cranking was because the ruined bearings were allowing the
armature to rub against the pole pieces.  I also found that the contacts
inside the solenoid looked burned and weren't very well aligned with each
other.  

The intermittent aspect was apparently because the quick connect to the
solenoid had worked loose slightly.  Not enough to pull off, but I could
feel a tiny bit of play in it.

I cleaned all that up and reinstalled it (with a simple heat shield) last
year.  Then I didn't drive the car from August until this week (after some
idiot backed into me at a stop light).  Now in the past few days, the drive
has started occasionally refusing to engage with the flywheel.  Might just
be dirty (there is body shop dust everywhere), but if it doesn't start
working better soon, I'm going to have to pull it again.  I may just go back
to an original later style starter (since I now have a later style flywheel
* gearbox).  Within its limitations, it was a pretty reliable piece.  The
original (as far as I know) early style starter on TS39781LO lasted some 40
years and who knows how many 100,000 miles (with occasional bushing and
brush replacements, of course).

Randall

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